CHARTERED VERSUS BOER RULE.

I believe I shall not be suspected of unreasonable advocacy of
Boer rule; but I do contend that South Africa as a whole, and the
English-speaking world at large, would have lost less by the civilisation of
these countries under the auspices of the Boer flag than under that of the
Chartered Company. Boer rule has its evils; the Boer is seldom just and
considerate to the aborigines of a country which he annexes
page: 61 (though, as a rule, I do not know whether they
tend to disappear faster under his rule than under that of other white men);
but as far as the European is concerned, the rule in a Boer republic is, in
most respects, healthy and natural. The Cape Colonist or foreigner from
Europe has never been refused admittance to these republics; and if in the
Transvaal the civic franchise has been somewhat injudiciously withheld from
certain newcomers, they possess every other privilege and right. As time
passes the little racial line between English colonists and their
forerunners will pass away
page: 62 throughout South
Africa; the English language will be universally used by all cultured
persons; English manners and customs will prevail (Pretoria is to-day more
English than Cape Town!); and in the long run, which in this case will only
be a run of thirty or forty years, it will make no difference whether any
part of this country was first civilised under the flag of the Boer or the
Englishman. The incoming streams of English-speaking men and women will
slowly but continuously mingle themselves with the body of earlier settlers,
and in forty years' time, whether we wish it or do not, there will
page: 63 be no Boer or Englishman as such in South
Africa—only the great South African people, speaking the English tongue,
following English precedents, and as closely united to England as Australia
or Canada.

This process of amalgamation and growth was in progress long before the
European speculator arrived among us, and it will go on were the Fates to
remove him from us tomorrow.

Had Dutch Voortrekkers taken possession of the regions between the Zambesi
and Transvaal there would not, on the whole, have been greater loss of
native life, nor more perfidy in
page: 64 dealing
with them, than under the Chartered Company; and one gigantic evil which is
now fixing itself upon those territories would not have come into existence.
The Boer tradition, like that of the genuine English settler all over the
world, has been this: that, in the new lands they inhabited, the soil and
the valuable productions of the land should be apportioned fairly among the
men who came personally to dwell and labour on it with their wives and
families. Rare minerals have not even as a rule been regarded as the
property of the individuals in whose lands they were
page: 65 found, but they have been regarded as the
property of the community, to any member of which it was open to obtain a
share in that property if he were willing to expend his own labour upon it.
In States founded in this manner the land and its wealth tended to be
distributed with tolerable equality throughout the community. This
will never be in Rhodesia. By the time the mass of men from the
Colony or Europe enter the country they will find everything of value—mines,
fertile lands, town properties—all in the hands of a small knot of men
headed by the leaders of the Chartered
page: 66
Company, consisting in part of persons who have never seen South Africa,
such as the Duke of Fife and others.

The great evil is not that these men possess the country as shareholders and
directors in the Chartered Company, nor that they retain the right to levy a
tribute of 50 per cent. on all precious stones and minerals found in the
entire territory, and that for many years to come they will hold extensive
control over the whole government of the country; but, what is immeasurably
more disastrous, before the country can be peopled by the ordinary colonist
a small knot of men (not
page: 67 the body of
shareholders as a whole, but that small body in whose interest the Chartered
Company was formed, and for whose benefit it is worked) will, either in
their own persons or by means of their emissaries, have gone over the whole
land, and whatever of real value these lands contain will be their private
property. If the Chartered Company were in ten or fifteen years' time, or
much sooner, to explode, and as a company to loosen its control over the
land and people, it would yet be found that the whole real wealth of the
country was appropriated and in the hands of a few private
indivi-
individuals
page: 68 duals forming syndicates and
trusts.

The worst social diseases which afflict the old countries of Europe will make
their appearance full grown in this virgin African land at the outset of its
career. That unequal division of wealth, which bestows vast riches upon some
individuals while the majority of the community are in abject poverty, is,
in those old countries, the outcome of institutions which are the growth of
centuries, and it is often softened by traditions binding the owners of
wealth to the land itself, and those who labour on it. In these new
territories no
tradi-
traditions
page: 69 tions will bind the owner to the
land and soften his relations with the people; the financial possessors of
the wealth of the country will exhibit on a colossal scale the worst evils
of absentee ownership, or the possession of a country by men who regard land
and people merely as a means for acquiring wealth.

The political life in these territories will be diseased. Even in the Cape
to-day we have seen how disastrous are the effects of gigantic wealth held
in a young country by a few individuals. There may be no deliberate
intention to bribe, but the mere possession of wealth
page: 70 which is enormous in comparison to the wealth of
the whole community (if the possessors be not singularly large and
impersonal in their aims, and if they interest themselves at all in
politics) throws into their hands a power of conferring benefits or
inflicting evils which will inevitably lead to an undue subjection to their
will; to the vitiation of representative institutions, and the destruction
of independent public life.

The colonist and the stranger from Europe will arrive and settle in these
territories, but they will discover that its townships, its valuable mines,
its richest lands have already been
page: 71 taken
possession of. They will find it a cake from which all the plums have been
carefully extracted, or like a body when the vultures have visited it,
leaving nothing but bare bones.

Is it for colonisation carried out on such lines as these that
the Cape Colony is to be asked to sacrifice its internal political and
social welfare? Is it to aid and abet a handful of men in gaining this
disastrous control over South Africa and its resources that the Cape Colony
is to obliterate itself? Is it to submit to any use which may be made of it,
so it only affords a stepping-stone, and gives prestige in Europe by
allowing
page: 72 its public appointments to be
held by them?